The new Yahoo! email beta.

07Oct05

Honestly, I was excited at first to witness the new Yahoo! mail beta first hand. I logged on and changed from the current interface to the new one and waited with baited breath. And waited. And waited.My very first impression was that it was slowwww. My second impression, once it loaded, was pretty cool new interface. But pretty cool new interface and usability, at least in this case, are mutually exclusive. There is enough lag in the beta to be bothersome. I get some screen rendering anomalies and it will render Firefox useless while it’s logging on (Firefox acts as if it’s locked up). I will post screen shots of my screen rendering issues if I get a chance. I’m also going to time the logon process so that you’ll get an idea of what it’s doing to my browser.

Incidentally, the new beta doesn’t render in Opera. Yahoo! will default to the basic style even though the beta is my default. I assume that at some point, support for Opera will be there.

After using the Yahoo! mail beta for a good couple of weeks, I can assure you that it’s no gmail killer. What’s the use of all the fluff if it slows things down noticably?